We have sought to teach a lesson and utter a warning of vital import.
If the reading of this book turns the thousands of women who yearly stand on the brink of destruction, and saves them as an honor to the motherhood of the race, then this book will have been of infinite value.
CHICAGO—WICKEDEST CITY IN THE WORLD.
Its wickedness is the outgrowth of the terrible irreligious system of commercialism that has reduced the sacred things of life to a filthy gold and silver valuation.
As long as men whose consciences are stifled by gold dust, whose souls are Godless, and whose hearts are dry and hard as rock, control our ballot box, so long shall Chicago live under an infamous stigma.
When the ballot box is cleansed of fraud, then the forces of sin will be dissipated and the Vice Combine of today dissolved.
The “redlight” districts must stand as pesthouses where death feeds on the bodies of men and women until the political foundations of the Vice Trust are dynamited and destroyed. So, too, the saloons, the dance halls, the thousands of dens of infamy and hell-holes, where the seed of sin is sowed in the hearts of innocent girls.
The police department, as we have shown, is a helpless, dependent, parasitic body. The Vice Trust has enslaved it. Just as long as the Vice Trust exists, so long will the police department do its bidding, while the laws are forgotten and disobeyed and a taxpaying public is left to the mercy of thieves and murderers.
But—